7 things I learned from staging my house

There’s a lot to think about when you’re staging a house. It’s not enough to pack everything into boxes and clean up. You need to stage your house to look it’s very best to get it sold at the desired price. So how to do that?

1. It’s not your home – find your target group.

Well, the first thing to do is to separate yourself from the thought of that it’s your home that your showing/selling. You are not staging your home for likes on Instagram or Facebook, you’re selling your house. From this point your house is a potential home for someone else. So who is this someone els or with a bit more accurate terminology who is your target group? What kind of people would be most likely interested in buying your home?

When you know that you can start styling your home to create an atmosphere that is attractive and speaks to your target group.

A great tip is to have a look around your own neighbourhood and see who lives there and what kind of activities can you attend. That usually gives you some kind of clue to whom might be interested. We also asked our broker who he thought would be our target group. According to him we could actually have several different kinds of target groups. That made things a little more complicated for us cause the house could apply to either a family, someone looking for a summer house or someone very interested in gardening. Nevertheless we were going to give it a go.

2 Choosing a theme

To be able to create an atmosphere that could appeal to a buyer you have to look at who the buyer actually is and what they might be looking for. When creating a specific mood it’s a good start to choose a theme both according to colors and emotions. We chose to enhance the feeling of a beach life and the relaxed artistic feeling and the aesthetics that comes with the theme.

This is how we reflected the artistic/relaxed beach life theme in the house:

My room became an inspiration room with a couple of my new paintings from the series pink birches at center.

The little stone circle in the garden was transformed with a little help from some pillows, a side table and a colourful carpet. It became an outdoor room, a cooling artistic resort where colouring books and pens served as inspiration.

3 Choose a color scale

Another thing you need to look at in a house is the colour scale. It’s not often you see a home that looks like it stepped right out of the catalog. We all have our different peculiarities which reflects in our beloved things. More then often the colour scale gets mixed and things tend to stick out and not in a good way. At a viewing you want to create a harmonic and unanimous impression as you possibly can. That’s why it’s important that the colours are working together and that you don’t have to many colours that are popping out.

We choose to work with the same colours as the beach outside with it’s light beige, grey and pink shades and of course natures yellow bright colour that you could find everywhere in the garden outside.

This is how it looked outside:

By the small cottage we put out a chair and a cup of coffee. Together with a glowing yellow sunflower an idyll was created. You could see the yellow colour almost everywhere in the garden cause most had bloomed over due to the drought. We added a bit of purple to get a little something that would pop out.

We cleaned up the sun deck and put the flower pots in order between the houses to create a relaxing and leafy feeling.

4 Scale down.

Stuff, things and clutter, this is something most of us have an excess of. I’m one of them that most likely have more then little when it comes to things and for that reason this part was a bit more difficult for me. The thought with scaling down is that you want the room to look inviting, but only so inviting that the buyer easily can place there own personal objects into it. You’re not creating a hotel room where they’ll check out, you only want them to check in. That’s why you’d want to trigger their imagination, not create a finished room with your own personal beloved things. A good rule of thumb when scaling down is to take half of what you think you need. So pack down the photograph of beloved auntie Vesta and exchange it for a discrete artwork instead. Keep the trinkets to a minimum but do choose a couple of nice and interesting pieces to decorate with. A smaller investment in some unanimous pillows and blankets can accentuate the room. Put away everything that don’t add like loads of toilet paper, dishes, 15 sets of towels, 20 unfinished books, clothes etc.

It’s always very different what you yourself like and what other people like. You have to try and keep your personal stuff to a minimum so that the house will appeal to the buyers. Cause after all you want to sell your house, not just show it of. All though it’s not possible or even a good idea cause after all it’s your personal things you are decorating with and we all have our own style.

My little ones playroom was transformed into an elegant bedroom and part of her toys was moved out to the other house which we use as a work room. This room was remade into a playroom. The transformation created a bigger house which instead of one bedroom got two and one room that the buyer easily could see as a playroom, work room, bedroom or even a guest room.

The little bathroom in the main house got some styling with some flowers and a little spa feeling.

The laundry room and bath room was sparingly decorated with some fresh towels.

5 Do not show of your furry loved ones

Who doesn’t love pets? Well, an easy answer to that question is the house buyer. Pets tend to wear down a house just like we people do but just a little bit more and you don’t want the buyer to think about this when they are looking at the house. So put all food and water bowls and pet beds away for the viewing.

6 Freshening up

Rewind and think back to when you bought the house. What was it that you wanted to fix and freshen up? Now, have you done it or is it like in our case; it’s been put on the waiting list? Well, now it’s time to take out those brushes, the hammer etc. and fix all of those little things to make the house look it’s very best.

As you know I’ve painted the bedroom before the photo shoot and with some pillows and blankets the room was totally remade.

7 Bring in some flowers, candles and fresh fruit

The very last touch that ties together the atmosphere in a house is the flowers, the candles, some fresh fruits or some freshly baked bread, cut on a nice wooden cutting board in the kitchen.

Our kitchen got a little lift with a smaller kitchen table and classic scandinavian colours with some picked beach plants and other finds served as decor. Some fresh greens from the potager brought that overflowing abundant feeling to life. And a little sign for artistic feel to bring it all together.

Then all you have to do is to take a step back and ask yourself, – if I was the buyer, would I like it?